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Subject: Re: Dazed and Confused
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Greg Boyce <gboyce@rakis.net>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 14:55, Greg Boyce wrote:
> I work in a company with a large number of Linux machine deployed all
> around the country, and in some of the machines we've been seeing the
> following error:
> 
> Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
> You probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips

There are several causes of an NMI depending on the system - hardware
failures is one, some systems do it for things like PCI errors, a few
boxes you see them on power management events (notably old 486's)

> Due to the number of machines and their locations, running memtest86 on
> them isn't exactly feasible.

Then buy better ram ;)

> Is there anything besides failing hardware that could be the cause of this
> error?  Also, how serious is this error?  Some of the machines reporting
> this error have had problems with programs crashing, while others seem to
> run fine.

Take a sample set of machines which have been crashing and run memtest86
on a couple. That should tell you if it is RAM. From a sample you can
then figure out how to handle the rest (things that come to mind if
memtest86 fails on the test machines include replacing the ram in a few
more then taking the old ram back to test)


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